Forget AI, All The Cool Kids Work on AGI Now

An article
by Ben Goertzel at the H+ blog reports on the AGI-09 conference. AGI
is an acronym for Artificial General Intelligence. A small group of 100
researchers met at AGI-09, favoring it over the AAAI 2008 conference
which drew 1000. The reason, according to AI researcher Marcus Hutter
was that, The top patriarchal AI conferences and journals have a bias
towards extending established sophisticated techniques and have a high
entry barrier for creative and more speculative novel approaches.
Ben Goertzel put is this way:

Ask the proverbial “man on the street” what AI is about and
you’re likely to hear mention of thinking machines from science fiction:
C3PO and R2D2, HAL-9000, Asimov’s various creations from “I, Robot”, the
Terminator, and so forth.

Ask the average AI researcher from an academic, industry or
government lab, on the other hand, and you’ll hear a different story.
Most AI research today has to do with quite narrow and specialized kinds
of intelligent software, a far cry from the AIs in popular media – and a
far cry from the dreams on which the AI field was founded.

In other words, mainstream AI research is now so far off track, that
researchers actually trying to create artificial intelligence have
renamed their field to avoid confusion. This is very hopeful
and it sounds like the new movement is adopting new technologies and
is open to new approaches. The Artificial General Intelligence Research
Institute offers the AGI Wiki where
you can find out more about the what going on, who's involved, and how
to participate. More photos
from AGI-09 can be found on flickr.

Their conference was sponsored by AAAI. Their speakers included some leading AI researchers. I wouldn't say it's that far offtrack, rather, that most of the AI conferences are concentrated on specialized subfields rather than unified intelligence.